ELECTRIC MARY: Sorry Padre!

RUSTY Brown, the singer for Australian rockers Electric Mary, has apologised for cupping the balls of a priest on stage during a Spanish show on the band’s recently-completed European tour.

Brown tells Hot Metal the holy man’s friends threw him up on stage and he attempted to make him feel “like rock star” by jokingly grabbing him in the groin area to give him a higher voice.

It was only afterwards that he learned the Spaniard was a man of the cloth.

“I did get a priest on stage and I didn’t know he was a priest at the time,” Brown tells us.

“I did try and turn him into a rock’n’roll guy and I did, like, an imaginary cupping of his cahunas. It wasn’t great, it just wasn’t great.

“He was OK, apparently. I felt a bit weird because he really was a priest. His friends said ‘he loved it, don’t even worry about it, because he goes to death metal shows … he’s just a rock animal’.”

The chastened singer issued a public apology on social media as soon as he found out he had touched a holy man inappropriately. Electric Mary are particularly popular in Spain and sold out some shows.

The Melbourne band is back home now but already planning another European jaunt in 2013. “We’re hoping to get back to Hellfest (in Clisson, France) again, which will be the basis of us next June and July,” Brown said.

“Then maybe there’ll be some festivals … in England, which would great. Even if we can’t do that, we’ll just get in the van again and drive around. Being Australian, we drive – that’s what we do.

“It’s been great. Spain was a bit hard – we did 10 shows in 11 days. Last year we did three shows in Spain. They’re in a lot of financial trouble and this year we did 10 and we did great numbers.

“There is evidence of progress.”

Although Irwin Thomas, aka former teen idol Jack Jones, is long gone from Electric Mary, the hard-rocking five-piece continues to be a strong draw at home and abroad.

Brown said: “The strategy is to do festivals. You can do small 200 (capacity rooms) or 300s and do 10 of them, or you can do one 25,000. It’s better to do the one, two, three or four 25,000s and see where we can take it.